It Felt Like A Kiss

It Felt Like A Kiss By Sarra Manning




Dedicated to the memory of Gordon Shaw who was always the most exemplary of fathers.


Thanks




Thank you to my bestie, Kate, who talked me down from so many ledges this year, and Lesley Lawson, Sophie Wilson and Sarah Bailey just for being there. Thanks also to Sam Baker, Sarah Franklin, Anna Carey, Julie Mayhew and my Twitter friends, who keep me sane and hooked up with cute pictures of doggies.

I have meant to say thank you to Leanne Forrester for an unconscionably long time, so, Leanne, thank you so much for all your support. And I would also like to give big, big, BIG thanks to Sue Goodyear, who has waited patiently for over two years to have her name in this novel after she very generously bid in the Authors for Japan auction. Sue, I hope you like your namesake!

As ever, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my wonderful agent, Karolina Sutton, and Catherine Saunders, Helen Manders, Alice Lutyens and all at Curtis Brown. I’d also like to thank my editor Catherine Cobain and Sophie Wilson (yes, I know two Sophie Wilsons), Madeline Toy, Sarah Roscoe, Sophie Holmes, Vivien Garrett and all at Transworld.

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It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. You know what I mean? It’s awfully difficult.


Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale





Camden, London, 1986


He was the most beautiful man Ari Underground had ever seen.

‘I could eat him for breakfast,’ she said to her friend Tabitha as they stood at the bar of the Black Horse. ‘He looks like a cross between James Dean and Serge Gainsbourg.’

‘He’s married,’ Tabitha said flatly. ‘Even if he wasn’t, he’s bad news.’

He might be married but he was also brooding and dark, and Ari wanted to lick the sneer right off his pretty face.

And if he was married then he had no right to be staring back at her.

Afterwards, when she’d come off stage in the tiny room above the bar, still high on the applause, the buzz, the sheer thrill of playing songs that hot-wired people’s hearts, and was packing her amp and her guitar into the back of the van that Chester had borrowed from his dad, she suddenly felt a pair of eyes painting pictures on the back of her neck.

Ari turned round and he was there, right there. Didn’t say a word, just took a step nearer, and another one, until she was pressed between the van and his hard body. This close she could see how long his eyelashes were, and the sneer disappeared because they were close enough that she could purse her lips and blow it away. It was a lot like kissing without actually kissing.

They weren’t touching either, though his body hustled her against the side of the van. When Ari panted a little because he was so intense, so silent, and she’d never been so turned on, it was as if he caught her every breath.

A door banged behind them, then she heard Chester say plaintively, ‘I’ve got to have the van back by midnight or my dad’ll kill me,’ and the spell was broken.

In the time it took to blink, Billy Kay wasn’t there any more.